Your Personal Path Diary Is Now Searchable

Path’s latest update makes it easier to search for specific entries, called “moments,” on a user’s profile.

Path, a mobile social networking app company based in San Francisco, is rolling out a big update today that adds search to its mobile app.

Path is a smaller, more intimate version of Facebook. Users can connect with a limited number of other users (150, to be exact) as friends to share their “moments.” Those moments vary from checking into locations to taking photos with a number of filters. It is built entirely for mobile devices.

Users will be able to search through those moments without having to scroll through an entire timeline to find it. Search queries can be categorized by a bunch of parameters: friends, places, dates and holidays, seasons and weather, locations, birthdays, moments, and emotions, the company says.

Following a redesign, Path now has more than five million users. Though it isn’t growing at the bleeding pace of a Facebook or a Twitter, that’s OK, as Path was designed as a “premium” service, he said.

The result is the app serves more the purpose of a mobile diary that users’ closest friends can view, said CEO Dave Morin in an interview. And now, it’s easier to find that specific moment a user seeks.

Or they can still take a trip down memory lane and scroll their way to the moment, Morin says.

We caught up with Morin for a moment to discuss the new app. Here’s an edited transcript of the interview:

WSJ: Why search? What’s the reasoning behind that?

Dave Morin: We’ve always seen Path as sort of a journal, we like calling it your Path through life, all your experiences in one place. Being able to go back in time and relive those things is one good reason to add this feature. It’s really hard to tell stories using your camera roll. It’s especially hard to tell stories using your Path given that up until now you weren’t able to go back in time. We wanted to put a search feature in, but we didn’t want to do any search feature. Path is a lot about memories, and being able to get back to those for a variety of different reasons and access their memories we thought was a really powerful thing.

WSJ: How does it work?

DM: I could just search, Japan with Dustin, using the search. It’s one of those things we wanted to make that so easy and so simple and so normal and natural that it just became part of your everyday workflow. You can search for friends, places, dates and holidays — Easter, Christmas — you can search for seasons. You can search by weather, say Winter, snowing, raining, you can do all kinds of locations. If I wanted to show you all my photos from Montana like I could. You can even break it down by emotion — you could say, show me my happy places. It’ll show you all the places that have received the most happy feedback on Path. It puts this incredibly powerful tool for remembering your life in your hands.

WSJ: By weather? How much data do you guys actually have for these moments?

DM: We really obsess over context at Path, we have a lot of context. We even put the weather in some moments. We add data to every single moment, we’ve gone through and consolidated the context and applied it in every moment. We have language you put into a comment, metadata that categorizes a place, weather data that tells us it was sunny at the time. We went through to know what time of the day the sun was setting, so you can type, ‘sunset photos.’ We’ve tried to make it a lot smarter based on the immense amount of data that we have, and make it basically that the user can put on a whole lot of photos. We have full partnerships with companies like Foursquare, we have many other partners for things like movie data, books, categories of all that stuff.

WSJ: So I can search through my friends’ Paths too?

DM: Yep, you’d search for Alexis. You could search for Alexis’ photos, Alexis’ photos San Francisco, happy, in the rain. You’d be able to narrow it down exactly to the moments.

We actually have a feature where, on the right hand of the search field, you shift into “Nearby” mode. It shows you the moments that have been posted nearby. If you show up in a new city, let’s say you showed up in Tokyo and in Path your friend posted that amazing sushi restaurant, typically you’d have to call your friend. Instead you hit “nearby,” and boom, you’d see the moments from that restaurant. It gives you this powerful discovery tool. It’s also about discovering the world around you through the lens of these memories.

WSJ: Are you guys planning on rolling these kinds of algorithms out to make it easier to discover new things?

DM: We’re not doing that in the feed right now. The way this feature has been developed, we look at it as 100% directly designed for users. It really is designed to be this incredibly powerful way to search all your own content, all your friends’ content, and get back to all those memories. It isn’t available anywhere else, we looked around the Internet and said, why doesn’t this exist. We built this on incredibly powerful technology, our engineers spent a lot of time with elastic search to build this. It’s powerful infrastructure, this is just the beginning, and it’ll become part of the experience.

WSJ: How has the year been for Path?

DM: I would say, we came out of last year with around a million users. We just hit 5 million users, we’re pretty excited about that. I think this release was really important to us, we saw it as the final piece of Path 2. To us, since we started the company, I’ve always thought of Path as bookmarking your life. If the Internet is now about life, then your mobile phone is your web browser, and we try to design Path this way to bookmark your life and capture those important memories in your life. Being able to search through it is very powerful, it really delivers a lot of value and innovation to the user.

WSJ: Path is limited in the number of “friends” you can have — does that slow the growth at all?

DM: The thing to remember about us is that we’re a premium-focused business. We don’t make money through advertising, for us, if you look at the companies that are premium focused — the Evernotes, Spotifys of the world — they’re 25 million or 50 million users businesses. We’re really happy with our progress and our yardstick is in that business. We try to focus on users and deliver value to users in direct ways that makes them really happy. We’re pretty happy with our growth, we don’t see any cap on the upside.